I have a lot of guilt and shame about my participation in fandom. I tell myself that I ought to have outgrown this kind of external obsession by my age. I tell myself that it’s not healthy to spend so much time in imaginary worlds. I tell myself that I should be more responsible in how I use my time, how I spend my money, where I put my energy. I look in the mirror and admit that I am using imaginary people and imaginary places and my attachment to them to avoid the problems of real life.
But here’s the thing: the world is a fucking dumpster fire. Every hour I spend writing Arthur and Eames smut is an hour in which I am not paralyzed with panic over the sexual abuses inflicted by real-world men. Every minute I spend re-reading and deconstructing the way Ngozi builds queerness in Check, Please! is one I don’t spend so angry I could throw up over the threats to queer people in the real world. Every night I spend appreciating the incredible OCs of color writers create in the fanfic I like to read is one I don’t spend in despair over this administration’s institutionalized and accepted racism. The longer I consider the potential of the Avengers to save the world from the dark forces of Hydra, the less time I have to lay awake and worry about the way my country’s president is destroying all of our international relationships.
I couldn’t live with myself right now if I didn’t spend a large chunk of my time and energy and money on the real-world fight. Things are simply too bad–I cannot stand by and watch without at least trying to do something. But if that was all I focused on, I would end up hurting myself. (Believe me, I know this, because in the final few months before the 2016 election and the first half of 2017, it WAS all I focused on.) I would end up so anxious and depressed that I would need far heavier duty coping mechanisms (not to mention drugs) than the ones I use now. Maybe there are people who can sustain a full-time commitment to changing the world, without needing to hide from it a bunch of the time, but I’m not one of them. So it’s better, I think, to accept that one of the things my participation in fandom gives me is an outlet, a way to focus completely on something that, in the end, I KNOW will be OK. Doing it all the time would be unhealthy, and my real-world relationships would suffer, but doing it a lot, right now, when things are so bad? It’s part of what keeps me sane.
Everyone has their thing. For some people it’s sports, or bird watching, or collecting things, or whatever. People need hobbies and interests to help them wind down from all the stress and real life crap. For us it just happens to be fandom. But I think fandom has such a negative stereotype and negative connotation that it ends up having an effect on us. We feel stupid or guilty for something that should be completely normal. It only becomes a problem if it’s keeping you from your real world responsibilities.
And those negative stereotypes and negative connotations have a lot to do with the fact that fandoms are women dominated spaces. Men tend to engage with media they admire by learning everything about the original, where woman tend to engage by creating fan content. My dad has a huge Batman stuff colection and that’s something he can joke about with his friends. He’s never made to feel any lesser for that, and people see that as something cool about him and give him batman related gifts all the time to help out. I have male friends who love Game of Thrones and know all the minor details and spend hours of their life speculating about it. But they never experience this shame and it’s socially acceptable for them to talk to people about their hobbies. But if I tell people about my inception blog or fanfiction they low key pity me and it has a lot to do with fandom being women dominated spaces and us internalizing the idea that anything mostly enjoyed by women is embarassing and wrong. I refuse to do that.
According to people who were able to reach me anonymously before I closed the anon asks (I do have a self-preservation instinct) I absolutely shouldn’t be near fandom AT MY AGE!!!!!
What should I do? Knitting and “taking my grandchildren to the park”. Well I don’t enjoy taking any children (never wanted to have my own, hence no handy grandchildren to drag around) to the park and/or knitting nearly as much as I do enjoy Inception and YOI, you ageist fucks. I’m not ashamed of it in the slightest, except yes, I should better control the time I spend online in general. Other than that – do what you love ladies, anyone who would “low-key pity you” can have a good hard look at themselves and their own interests (beer? watching porn? online shopping for designer handbags? online celebrities hating? bashing other moms? going to white power rallies?) and shut the fuck up.
Fandom & how to cope
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